r/sleeptrain

Baby is 8 months old for context.

I posted on here a month or two ago with my baby waking up every 2-4 hours overnight. I was convinced she was super overtired. The comments told me to increase her wake time from 8 hours to 10 hours per day. I originally didn’t even try this, thinking my baby would get even worse with overtiredness.

Well what do you know, a month ago I decided that my baby can’t be sleeping so badly and doing 2h wake windows anymore. I started stretching them to 3/3.5 hours with 10 hours awake total and BOOM she started doing 8 hour stretches with one wake up to eat, and she slept through the night for the first time last night!

This is my thank you to everyone here who recommends a strict schedule and enough awake time, it saved my life!

My son is about to turn 2. We did extinction when he was 13 months and it worked really well. He’s regressed over the last 2 months and bedtime has been brutal. Chair method not working. Ferber never worked I suspect that will still be the case. Tempted to do extinction again. Is he too old? I worry about it being too upsetting for him.

He’s on one nap a day, FYI. His ideal schedule would be 6/630 wake, 1230-230 nap, 730/8 bed. But his schedule now with his messed up sleep is 5-530 wake, 12-230 wake (we wake him) and 8-9 he falls asleep.

Hi everyone! Trying to reset my almost 8 mo olds schedule! She’s been on 2 naps for awhile. She’s struggling with early am wakes. She sometimes resettles for a little more on her own in the morning but usually wakes around 5:30. I’m trying 9:15 and 1:15 naps, capping the first at an hour because the second has been so short lately, I’m not sure if it’s a coincidence but the second nap was 1.5 hours today! I have been trying that schedule for the past couple of days & they’re definitely more solid naps. She’s just exhausted by the end of the day, and she cries before most every sleep. She may be a “power down” baby but I am struggling to just keep letting her do this. The clock strikes like 5:30/6pm and I want to put her to bed because she’s so tired. What can I do to help her? How long do you give a clock based schedule a shot before you try something else? Trying to regulate her schedule.

My daughter is almost 6 months old, and ever since the 4-month sleep regression she hasn’t been able to connect sleep cycles on her own. She wakes every 45–60 minutes for both naps and overnight and needs help (dummy, patting, or rocking) to get back to sleep.
Did your baby eventually grow out of this? If so, when? Or did you have to sleep train? I’d love to hear what worked for you because I feel like we’ve been stuck in this cycle for almost 2 months and I’m honestly about to go crazy

My LO will be 7 months on 09 July and over the last 2 weeks has reverted from only waking g once at night to feed and then sleeping until 6:30am to waking to feed and then also waking at 4am every morning and only contact sleeping until 6:30am. She also mostly only sleep independently for naps for about 30 - 45 minutes before needing a nap rescue and very rarely does a full nap independently.

We decided to put her on a 2 nap schedule to see if it helps. We put her on 2.75/3/3.25 with 1.5 hour naps. The first day she did really well. Doing decent naps independently but night sleep remained the same. Then day 2 and 3 of the schedule she went back to 30 minute independent naps and being extremely difficult to get back to sleep, but waking g at 5:30 instead of 4am. Last night was the worst so far, waking at 9, 3 and 5:30 and contact sleep until 6:30 am and today's first nap only lasted 25 minutes and took me 15 minutes to get back to sleep. I will add I do t have strict nap cut off times and have each nap be a total of 1.5 hours of actual sleep. She is also still pretty happy and awake after the 3.25 ww before bed and takes some effort to get to sleep (not crying just rolling around happy).

I am obviously doing something wrong here lol. Should I have strict nap cut offs rather than floating naps to get to 1.5 hours of actual sleep each. Should I extend last ww, or have I just completely messed this up and need to start over?

We have a super fun and super busy 9 month old. Sleep has always been hard. Always had a lot of crying regardless (colic).

We sleep trained at 5 months. Did everything, dropped to 2 naps, no associations, 2.75/3/3.5 at the time, and she would scream for 30+ minutes at every nap and sleep. CIO every time. And we did 6/4 overnight. She did this for months until I reintroduced nursing right before sleeping, no more screaming, same or better sleep at night/day. That was 7.5 months to present.

Recently she's been screaming again before bed. Naps are okay if I put her down. 3/3.5/4. I don't mind having a feed to sleep association, but she's started screaming for 45 minutes going to bed at night again. Sleeps her usual 5-8 hours, Motn feed, sleeps 2-5 more hours depending on when she wakes.

I just want the screaming to stop, I feel awful as a parent when it's just screaming for a long time, she's so pitiful.

Things to note:

She cut her first tooth this week, we've been giving Tylenol

She learned to sit up this week.

She's trying to pull to stand now.

I'm so used to bedtime false starts that it doesn't feel like an issue anymore... BUT then I'm reminded that they are when I sit next to my baby everyday waiting for the 40min mark to nurse him again to sleep. This started around 3 months. He is 6 now. I ran out of things to try. So I'm here basically to ask if anything worked for other moms so I can feel happy for them lol.

My baby is almost 7 months old. She sleeps about 1.5-2hrs during the day, and we try to maintain 3/3/4. Bedtime is 8pm and we wake her at 8am if she’s not up already.

She wakes about 3-4 times most nights and I nurse her back to sleep, which mostly feels manageable. She mostly falls asleep independently for naps.

The trouble is bedtime. Her father gives her a bottle between 1 hr and 45 min before bedtime, which she takes happily. We then read some books, change her and put her sleep sack on, and during this whole time she is happy as can be.

But recently, she has started wailing the second we move to put her in the crib. A month ago we were hopeful that we could begin to move towards independent night sleep; now it feels impossible. She is distraught and must be held and sung to until she calms down and eventually falls asleep, every night. She often has false starts and calming her can take an hour on a bad night.

What’s wrong? Is it possible she needs even LESS daytime sleep? (I’m not sure I will cope if so lol). We’ve also tried encouraging more daytime sleep, but it’s hard work and doesn’t seem to come naturally to her. Thanks so much for any ideas or insight.

My 13 month old has been sleep trained since he was 6 months but now our schedule has been all over the place and I'd love some advice.

We are down to one nap as of three weeks ago. He sleeps from 7:30pm-6:00am and then I bring him into bed and we cosleep until 7:00am (which I know isn't ideal but we're so exhausted). He then naps at 12 and has been doing really inconsistent naps, sometimes only an hour long. When he gets up at the 1 hour mark, sometimes I can resettle him to sleep for another hour but sometimes not. If he doesn't go back to sleep then I move up his bedtime.

I'm trying to get away from the morning co sleeping, but what should his schedule realistically look like at 13 months? Do I need to move back to two naps? I'd really hate to do that as he is now much more aligned with our 3 year old son, but at this point he is sleeping less than his older brother, who still takes 2.5 hours naps during the day.

Are my wake windows royally off for his age? This is what we were doing with our older son and it worked beautifully for him.

Hi all! My previously sleep trained 14 month old (STTN since 9 months and great napper) has been scream crying as soon as I put him in his crib for naps which was not the case before. Ferber not working at all (he stands up for the whole hour and wont lay down). We are on 2 naps (3/3/4), however I decided to give a 1 nap day a try yesterday and he went down at 11am without a single tear and slept for 3hrs. Today he woke up at 5am (DWT 6:30) crying. Tried to put him down for his first nap at 11am and scream cried again and Ferber failed. What am I doing wrong? Is he not ready for 1 nap?

My 5 month old has been a pretty good sleeper at night but utilizing probably unsustainable methods. She will have a very long, sleepy nurse to sleep (which is usually our cue that she is in fact actually ready for bed) and I lightly jostle her slightly awake upon transfer to her crib which usually helps prevent a false start. We start the feed sometime between 7 7:30, and she’s usually in her crib sometime between 7:45 and 8:30. She might have a couple tiny wakes at night but very rarely needs help falling back asleep, and will have typically one wake to feed which has been after a 5-7 hour stretch of sleep. She has slept through the night once. She usually gets between 10 and 11 hours of sleep at night and we wake her by 7:30am but she usually wakes on her own between 7-7:30.

The issue is naps. We’re kind of in a transition period from 4 to 3 naps so that isn’t helping anything, she seems to be most comfortable with wake windows around 2 hours at this point. Not only does she not take a nap longer than 30 minutes unless she’s in a carrier or contact nap, but she cries and screams when we try to start a crib nap. At first we thought we were missing the timing that she was tired not sleepy, and the pacifier became our clue—if she took it she was sleepy enough, but then it seemed like her wake windows needed to get longer and we literally cannot get her to nap in her crib without lots of screaming. We do not feed to sleep at nap times and she has bottles during the workday while I work. She’s been getting between 2-2.5 hours of hard fought daytime sleep recently and I’m just at a complete loss of how to help her go down for naps without the chaos or extended ordeal.

Her nights are so good but I know this probably isn’t sustainable and I don’t know how to work on the naps without having to mess with the nights.

Hello! Our little one just turned two a few days ago. For the past year or so, he's been a great sleeper: after his bedtime routine, we put him down in his crib awake and he lays down quietly and falls asleep on his own within a few minutes, then sleeps through the night. (Usually like 8 pm to 6 am, or about ten hours.) This was happening happily until about a week ago. Literally like ten days ago my husband and I were like, "Man, we're so happy we have such a good sleeper now." We did cry it out sleep training with him (and had to re-do it a couple times) between the ages of 6-10 months. Our bedtime routine takes about 20 min (brush teeth, diaper and PJs with a song, read 3-5 books, light out and say goodnight.)

The issue: starting about a week ago, little one is fighting sleep all the time like CRAZY and it's just getting worse day by day. This is happening at both naps and bedtime. You can tell he's super tired - eyes drifting down, swaying on his feet - but he just stands up in his crib and screams and cries. (Usually he starts by shouting words: "Eat!" or "More read!" but then progresses to just scream-yelling.) last night we did just leave him and it took about 50 min before he laid down and went to sleep, yelling or crying pretty much the whole time. Feels terrible. Of course he’s happy as a clam this morning.

The current schedule is wake up around 7 am; nap for 1-1.5 hours, usually starting around 1 pm; start bedtime routine about 7:30 pm, laying him down in crib a few min before 8 pm. Maybe we need to push nap and bedtime each later now that he’s often sleeping until seven am.

I've heard that sleep regressions can happen at this age, and that keeping a consistent routine is important. The routine has always ended with - put down awake, say goodnight and we love you, and leave. BUTTTTT it took 50 min last night. At nap yesterday after an hour I just got him and put him in the stroller for a walking nap and he fell asleep within four minutes in the stroller. If my husband goes in and rubs his back and shushes him, he'll fall asleep. Should we just make that a new part of our routine?

What would you do?

He is not sick, he's been eating normally, super active days and outside all the time. Super happy during the day, but somehow can no longer independently go to sleep??? He's definitely expanding his vocabulary every day, so some developmental growth happening.

My baby is 5.5 months old. We started sleep training 3 days ago and it’s worked fine. Where I’m really struggling is naps. They’ve never been a great napper independently but about two weeks ago we started getting into a glorious rhythm where they’d take 2 2 hour naps. This lasted about 4 days and then naps went to crap again. I can’t even focus on wake windows because it’s just a crap shoot getting them to nap. They also go to daycare where they won’t nap. They are there daily for ~7 hours and will nap a whopping 40 mins. Once home I can usually do 1 40 min nap. A good day of naps is ~1.5 hours in total.

If they fall asleep in my arms and I put them down they immediately cry and do not stop. If I put them down awake they cry and do not stop. I honestly just don’t know what to do because half my weekends are just trying to get them to nap and then my weekday evenings are just trying to deal with an overtired infant. I was trying to do 2/2.5/3/3 wake windows but that’s not even working since naps are so hit or miss.

I don’t even know what to do at this point. Any help or advice is greatly appreciated.

Hi,

My 13 month old has bedtime of 8 pm and has been waking at 4:45-5:30am every. single. day. we have tried switching him to one nap but it’s really challenging to stretch his first wake window when he wakes up at 5 am so most days he does a nap from 9:30-11:00am sometimes to 11:30am and then he does a nap from 3-4:30pm. Any advice? Much welcomed!!

Baby is just over 8 months. Wake windows are 2.5-3/3.5/4.

I’m currently doing my own modified version of Ferber, baby is in a sidecar crib, so I lay on my bed beside the crib and if she gets worked up to the level of scream crying, I pat her bum to calm her down to just regular crying then stop patting. Usually after about 15 mins she falls asleep. The issue is that she’s used to me bringing her into bed and nursing back to sleep later in the night. After about 11pm she won’t go back to sleep with just patting in the crib. I don’t know what to do with night wakes now to support the sleep training since nothing I do gets her to settle in her crib. Do I stop nursing but still cosleep for the second half of the night? I do offer a bottle around 12-1 to make sure she’s not hungry. She’s eating 2-3 meals of solids a day and doesn’t even finish the bottle at night so I don’t think hunger is an issue. I just don’t know what to do with the night wakes.

Baby was sleep trained at 4 months with a sleep consultant and now falls asleep on her own and stays asleep for about 10-11 hours overnight. She will wake to cry for a couple mins in the night twice and back to sleep in usually in 10 mins max. As of today her wake windows are 2.25/2.25/2.25/2.5 with 3 naps in the day capping daytime sleep to 3 hours. She falls asleep between 5-10 mins of either no crying for some hard crying. Depends on the day.

Most of the time she only makes it to 6-6:30 pm for bedtime since she’s up between 6-6:30 am (that is also the earliest I will get her as she has woken a few times before 6 and let her CIO and she will usually fall back asleep and wake within the 6am window. I would ideally like her to wake no earlier than 7am.

We feed upon wake, feed 30-40 mins before bedtime, and are fully night weaned. Gets enough milk in the daytime.

My first baby was a 7pm-7am sleeper on a fixed schedule from 5 months and she did well with that, so I’m new to the whole wake window type of schedule and miss the predictability of the fixed time schedule.

I guess my question is:
- does this seem age appropriate. I’ve seen a lot of discussion on here about total awake time which the consultant didn’t tell me about
- do fixed schedules ever work for babies this young and on 3 naps? I know it did for my first but her sleep training journey was very easy compared to my second.
- does total awake time matter?
- and what can I do to get my baby to sleep until 7am
- sample schedules/wake windows would be appreciated.

Baby is just 4 months old and we’ve been in the regression for about a week and a half. Before that he was sleeping through the night with 1 feeding. Now it’s just a toss up every night of how many times he wakes, last night it was 7 with 2 feeds because maybe he’s hungry? I feel like we’re doing the major things right so I’m looking for help on the next step. Do we go full sleep train mode or wait until 5 months?

What we’re doing:

• Following wake windows during the day (1.5- 2.5 hours)
• Keeping him “active” and stimulated during the day, including outside time
• Takes 4 naps ranging 30 min to 1.5 hours for a total of 3.5-4 hours of daytime sleep
• Prioritizing daytime feeds, working in one extra compared to before regression. Feed right after nap, not before sleep
• Consistent bedtime routine with 2 hours awake before and feed at the beginning
• FALLS ALSEEP INDEPENDENTLY. Everything I read says he’ll sleep longer once he cracks this and he did. He falls asleep within 10 minutes of being put down every night (and most naps)
• Least to most support during wake ups: paci, rub cheek, stroke cheek, boring pick up, bounce pick up, feed (only feed if 5/3/3)

What we could maybe improve, what’s the biggest culprit??

• Uses a paci: cut this out? How??
• Is in bedside bassinet: should we move him away? His big sister is in the only other room so that’s not an option yet. And honestly I dread the idea of doing 7 wake ups leaning over into a pack and play rubbing his cheek
• Do a dream feed at 10 to get ahead of potential growth spurt hunger?

That’s really all I can think of. Is there something else I’m missing? I’m going crazy searching this sub and all the Google experts at 1 and 2 and 3 am and just need to know I’m not messing things up further

Not Sleep Training per se but are using some of the principles and have found advice on this sub useful.

Our 7 month old is generally (touch wood) a good sleeper. She is generally a high sleep needs baby.

Current schedule is

Night Sleep 7.30pm - 6am (I am aware how good this is) She occasionally still wakes up for a feed but is back down quickly.

Daytime sleep varies, we do 2/3/2.5/2.5 but this varies depending on how long she naps are and what we are doing. Naps are either contact/pram/car naps (this is something we are going to work on if the below thing doesn't work)

We would like to move towards her falling asleep independently more which we are slowly doing, but the main thing is we would like her to wake up later.

We are trying to shift her bedtime later as I am aware that at this age her amount of night time sleep is very good. We have been slowly shifting it so she is down more like 8pm but it hasn't changed her wake up time.

My question is, how long do we try this for before we accept that 6am is just when her rhythm is set for?

Hello! My LO is 6 months in 10 days’ time and my husband and I have decided it’s time to evict him- he is basically too big for his bassinet in our room now that he can roll, I think some of his crying might be related to a lack of space for moving around(?!). Also, my husband snores and there have definitely been times I notice LO stirring straight after a particularly loud snore! However, I’m scared to take the leap as I worry he’s going to get worse at sleeping and his room is directly above ours so the idea of trudging upstairs to tend to him isn’t that appealing…

For context in terms of how he sleeps, we tend to see one wake around 5am, and it takes a while for him to re settle, and even then we probably only get another 45 mins sleep.

He goes down by 7.30pm, and he’s not strictly sleep trained but can self settle probably 60% of the time. Again, we want to ‘properly’ sleep train but understand this works best in their own room.

We do a dream feed at 10.30pm, of which he generally has half the bottle, which is another thing we ideally want to wean him off but worry it’ll cause another wake earlier in the night.

We follow the Sleep Chief Co’s 3 nap schedule of roughly 9.15 am nap (30-40 mins), 12.15 nap (1.5h but he struggles with this so often have to resettle him half way), and then a cat nap around 4.15 for 20 mins but recently he has been fighting this in the last week.

Does anyone have any positive experiences in moving their baby to their own room and also then sleep training them?

I have a 6-month-old baby, and I honestly don’t know where to start with sleep training.

He’s always been a very clingy baby. When he was only a few weeks old, he started what seemed like breath-holding spells whenever he became extremely upset. Because of that, we got into the habit of picking him up before his crying escalated.

As a newborn, he actually slept really well at night in his bedside bassinet while swaddled. We had the occasional rough patch, especially during the 4-month sleep regression, but the past couple of weeks have been by far the hardest.

We had to transition him to his cot because he can now roll, and it’s been an absolute nightmare. On top of that, I had surgery about six weeks ago and wasn’t allowed to lift him. My husband works night shifts, so the only way I could safely care for him overnight was by co-sleeping while I recovered, as it meant I didn’t have to keep lifting him in and out of the cot.

Now that I’ve recovered, we’ve tried moving him back to his cot, but he’s been waking every hour. The only way he’ll sleep for a longer stretch is if he’s lying next to me. I’m worried I’ve accidentally created this habit, and I’m scared it can’t be undone.

I also really struggle with any form of cry-it-out. Hearing my baby cry makes me incredibly anxious. We’ve tried putting him down drowsy but awake so many times, but it always backfires. As soon as he’s laid down, he cries, and it quickly escalates.

Last night, while my husband was home, he spent over two hours trying the drowsy-but-awake approach. Every time he picked our son up, he’d calm down immediately. The second he was laid back in the cot, he’d start crying again. This cycle went on for more than two hours until I finally asked my husband to stop because I couldn’t listen to him cry anymore.

Daytime sleep isn’t any better. He only contact naps. If I try to transfer him, even when he’s in a deep sleep, he’ll wake almost instantly. There have even been days when he’s skipped naps because every transfer failed.

I’m completely exhausted and so sleep deprived. I feel like I’ve failed him. I keep blaming myself and wondering if I’ve caused all of this. I’m also scared that my exhaustion, combined with co-sleeping, could put him at risk, even though it’s currently the only way either of us gets any sleep.

I’ve read so much about baby sleep. We have a consistent bedtime routine, I follow age-appropriate wake windows, I make sure he’s getting enough milk and solids during the day, and his room is dark with white noise and a comfortable temperature. Despite all of that, nothing seems to help.

I feel completely stuck. Every evening I become anxious because I know bedtime is going to be another marathon. More than anything, I just want my baby to be able to sleep safely in his own sleep space, but right now it feels impossible.

Has anyone been through something similar with a baby who only contact napped, needed to co-sleep after unavoidable circumstances, or couldn’t tolerate being put down awake? What finally worked for you? I could really use some advice or even just some hope that this won’t be forever.